‘Academic Freedom Week’ Hosts Only Leftists

On Monday, Columbia students will be treated to a panel called “On the Palestine Exception,” featuring Rutgers professor Jasbir Puar, who argues that Israel harvests Palestinian organs, UCLA professor Gil Hochberg, who thinks the “militarized gaze” of Israeli soldiers is a “tool of dominance,” and Columbia’s own Joseph Massad, who has redefined anti-Semitism to also include hatred of Muslims. Yay! Diversity of opinion!

And it gets even better with Tuesday’s “White Supremacy in Academia.” Get out your pen and paper for some insightful comments from Trinity College professor Johnny E. Williams, who called whites “inhuman assholes,” using the hashtag #LetThemFuckingDie.

But if there’s a VIP of the VIPs, it’s gotta be George Ciccariello-Maher, the professor who tweeted “all I want for Christmas is white genocide” and said the Las Vegas massacre “is what happens” when white people “don’t get what they want.” Ciccariello-Maher will be paneling Wednesday’s “Academic Antifascism” panel because he is, of course, also a big fan of the men in black. Now there can only be one winner, but his fellow panelist San Diego State University prof “Ozzie” Monge deserves a shout-out for threatening to lower a white student’s grade when she dared disagree with him over the school’s Aztec mascot.

What’s really fascinating about this Columbia event is that while the pro-Palestinian student sponsors say universities have attacked and silenced these speakers, almost none of them actually were. Drexel put Ciccariello-Maher on leave and then made him teach classes remotely for security reasons until the professor chose to resign and San Diego State kicked Monge out of the classroom, but only after the California DOJ found him guilty of racial retaliation, but that seems to be it. If you want to host a real academic freedom event, Columbia, maybe you should invite fewer lefties who are a little too edgy for the in-group and more conservatives who have no hope of making it into the group to begin with.

College Educates K-12 Teachers On ‘Post-Whiteness’

Four-hundred K-12 educators hailing from 24 states and 13 countries are receiving professional development credits for learning how to incorporate social justice concepts into their curriculum this week, reported The Daily Caller News Foundation. The convention, called Reimagining Education, was hosted at Teachers College, Columbia University, which is a graduate education school around Columbia but which, as a spokeswoman was quick to tell me, is a separate entity from the Ivy League school. But come on, it’s not like they aren’t related.

So let’s take a look at what I’m sure are the very scholarly, not at all biased things these teachers learned. Tuesday’s first session was “How Can Social Studies Teachers Be Agents of Social Justice?” which instructs teachers on how they can incorporate “critical race theory” into their classes to trigger “student-school-community activism.” Because in progressive academia, we’re not just going to teach what to think instead of how to think, but we’re also going to forge your 4 to 18-year-olds into political weapons. Are you excited yet?

I never understood why these loons capitalized colors like they’re countries. I mean, there’s no nation of white that I’m aware of. Oh and if holding your child back for no good reason whatsoever doesn’t appeal to you, maybe these other sessions that show you how to “decenter whiteness” and move towards “post-whiteness” at your school will be more enticing. I mean, come on, don’t you want your 10-year-old child to learn about “racial microaggressions” and how America is “a society built on institutional racism”? Noooo? What are you, a bigot?

So Tuesday at the Columbia conference was definitely the most “woke,” as they say. But Wednesday and Thursday courses did address other very valuable and not at all politically-motivated topics like a little something called “food justice,” as well as the need to discuss gender and race in kindergarten.

Teachers College spokesman James Gardner told me that the school aims “to equip educators with the research-driven and evidence-based strategies and tools to engage students from all backgrounds.” But engage them in what, James? The answer, make no mistake, is ideological warfare.

Like this:

Related

Columbia Prof Blames ‘Every Dirty, Treacherous’ Act On Israel

Columbia University professor Hamid Dabashi tweeted “every dirty treacherous ugly and pernicious act happening in the world just wait for a few days and the ugly name of ‘Israel’ will pup….” Will pup? Another indication of a heretic is an inability to string sentences together. Let’s take a look.

The professor has cancelled class to fulfill his “moral duty” of going to a pro-Palestinian rally. One thing that’s really insidious about Dabashi’s anti-Israel rants are the very visceral language he uses:

“Half a century of systematic maiming and murdering of another people has left its deep marks on the faces of [Israelis],” says the professor. “The way they talk, the way they walk, the way they handle objects, the way they greet each other, the way they look at the world. There is an endemic prevarication to this machinery, a vulgarity of character that is bone-deep and structural to the skeletal vertebrae of its culture.”

That sounds an awful lot like something certain doctors from a certain historical dictatorship would say, doesn’t it? And it doesn’t seem like Dabashi has a lot of tolerance for disagreement with his ideas, either. The professor wrote an essay alleging racism in the Israeli military and when a Columbia grad student who had served in the Israeli military dared to object via email, Dabashi forwarded the message to Columbia admins, saying “Given the military record of this person, I also feel physically threatened” and asking for security to “protect [his] person from a potential attack by a militant slanderer.” His request was denied.

Like this:

Related

Pro-Palestinian Students Protest During Holocaust Remembrance

Pro-Palestinian students held a “Gaza solidarity rally” near a candle lighting pro-Israel students hosted to commemorate Yom HaShoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day in Israel, reported The Algemeiner. Columbia’s Students Supporting Israel chapter claims that the anti-Israel Jewish Voices for Peace, Students for Justice in Palestine, and another divestment group “have monopolized the conversation on campus relating to the Israeli-Arab conflict and have systematically maligned, harassed and silenced” Zionist opinions, The group says “One individual’s right to protest does not supersede another individual’s right to lawfully assemble, speak and listen.”

Students Supporting Israel cites pro-Palestinian students’ disruption of Danon’s speech. But the pro-Israel group also claim they were targeted with anti-Israel and anti-Semitic slogans while attending an event and that, when they attended another pro-Palestinian event, six students were assigned to watch their group, asked them to stop filming, and ultimately asked them to leave when one girl wouldn’t turn over her phone. Victor Muslin, head of Columbia’s Alums for Campus Fairness group said “In general, the attitude of Columbia appears to be to stonewall and simply to ignore alumni. Right now we are like flies hitting a glass window.”

But this doesn’t seem like an isolated incident of wackiness at the Ivy League institution. In October, Columbia pledged to spend at least $100 million on diversifying its staff. This amount was in addition to the $85 million spent since 2005. And last summer, Columbia hosted 300 K-12 principals and teachers to learn about topics like whiteness and microaggressions.

A lot of guys use a hotness/craziness scale to rate girls, saying the hotter they get, the crazier they get. With Ivy League institutions like Columbia, it seems like there’s a similar correlation between craziness and prestige.